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Topic: Computing and Religion (Read 1861 times)

Now that we have a technical board (hooray!), I thought it might be interesting to discuss a comment that Umberto Eco famously made about computers, using a religious analogy. Eco said that the Macintosh was the Catholic computer, while the PC was the Protestant Computer. Essentially, Eco meant that the PC represented the hardworking, pragmatic ethos of Protestant countries, while the Macintosh represented the greater emphasis on aesthetics, the marriage of form and function, that at least Eco saw as present in Catholic societies.

Obviously in Eco's mind we didn't even rate. But I wonder ... what do you think is the Orthodox Computer, and why? Not in the sense of this is the computer that Orthodox should use (LOL!), but rather in the analogical sense that Eco uses.

being seen as old and traditional and by many as the foundations of all churches wouldn't we be the Abacus? after all it was the first computer. or atleast something old. like a Commodore 64. anyone remember those in the 80s? hehehe ahhh to be 10 again

Try Unix, BSD or Linux. Traditional, reliable, dynamic, open-source operating systems whose goal is to benefit the user of the OS. They look at the goals of mac and windows and say, "huh??"

There are a lot of good distributions. Kind of like Orthodoxy. There is RedHat, Mandrake, Suse, Debian, and many others. Yet all essentially use the same kernel. Different flavors, same basic substance. See, like Russian, Serbian, Antiochian, American, Carpatho-Russian, Serbian, Czechoslovak, Romanian, Bulgarian and, ummm, yeah, Serbian.

Not that I'm suggesting that you all go out and download the latest version of Linux or, say, easy-to-use Suse Linux. I personally run RedHat 9, Mandrake 10 and Suse.

But far be it from me that I suggest that any of you go to Suse's website and download a copy of the OS that runs completely on a CD so you can try it out first.

“ I do miss my mainframe a lot, and playing with Herc sure brings back memories. Just seeing the IBM message prefixes, and responding to console messages again was a wonderful bit of nostalgia! ” — Bob Brown

Now where were we? Oh yeah - the important thing was I had an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time. They didnÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢t have white onions because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big yellow ones...